


Revolt

by attackfish



Series: Good People and Death Eaters [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Slavery, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Gen, Slavery, Sort Of, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, the sort of kind of order of the phoenix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 09:13:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13361397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attackfish/pseuds/attackfish
Summary: As James confronts the reality of being the slave to a spy, Harry comes to terms with being made into a Horcrux.





	Revolt

The awning shielded James from the sun and threw his face into shade. Leaves from a few scrawny trees planters along the sidewalks spun and fluttered in the late October wind. The clear air was icy, and he hunched further into his Muggle jacket. Off in the distance, he thought he could see a Dementor, black cloak stark against a puffy white cloud, but if it was a Dementor, it was too far away to be causing the chilly weather.

He had heard the Dementors had been set loose to roam Muggle streets and towns since the conquest, but it wasn't like he had been able to get away from Hogwarts and Godric's Hollow long enough to see it for himself.

Muggles rushed past him, into and out of the stores that lined the street, hurrying to get back to their own homes, full of the old magics and protections that they had never been aware of before. All they knew now was that when they were home, the dark clouds lifted a little, and they could smile and feel safe. They knew that they hated gathering into groups anymore, but they didn't know it was because crowds drew the Dementors like ants to a sugar bowl. James vaguely contemplated which was worse, knowing that Voldemort had conquered the island, being enslaved, watching people die, or not knowing, not knowing why there didn't seem to be any happiness left, or why so many people were disappearing and the government couldn't do anything, why there were so many freak storms and buildings and bridges falling down, why people turned up shambling around, empty, victims of the Dementor's Kiss. When he realized what he was doing, he flinched back, yanking his mind away from that line of reasoning like a parent with an errant child.

He fiddled with the brim of his hat, stopped himself, and took another sip of his pumpkin juice, hidden in a thermos. There was no reason to be nervous, he insisted to himself. He was early, and it wasn't like the man was ever on time. He was always late. There was no reason to be nervous.

It was just that it had been _years._

A teenaged girl paused long enough to eye him dubiously. People just didn't sit outside in front of cafes anymore, and she was probably too young to remember a time when they did. He leveled her with a steady, challenging look. She glared at him back as she hustled away.

He heard the cafe door open behind him and the hairs at the back of his neck stood on end. "All right," the man who had walked through that door barked. "What information do you have that's so important I had to come see you myself?"

James lifted his head up and turned to face the man who had spoken. "Hey Sirius."

He could see the man's knees buckle. He stared at James, his mouth open, then slowly, the corners of his mouth spread and pulled up, until he was grinning at him, wide eyed and stunned. "James?" James stood up and Sirius wrapped his arms around him. "I thought you were dead! What-"

Sirius's hands tensed on James's shoulders when his eyes landed on the earring. "It's all right," James assured him, putting his hands on Sirius's arms. "I'm fine."

"Who?" Sirius gasped weakly. "That... thing isn't going to lead your owner to us?"

James shook his head. "You think I would?"

Sirius sat down heavily. "No, no of course not. Who..." And when James shrugged and looked down at himself with a rueful smile, Sirius looked down too, at James's clothes, old and out of date, faded black Muggle clothes, clothes he had already seen on someone else. "Oh," he said, putting it all together. "Wait, you belong to Sn-"

"Yeah," James interrupted repressively, before Sirius could say something he regretted, feeling out of place. That had always been Remus's job, reeling them in if they went too far.

Sirius gave off a soft, sympathetic grunt. "I'm sorry."

"Could be worse," James told him, with a slight smile. "Could be Bellatrix. Or Peter."

Sirius's handsome face darkened, and twisted into something ugly at the mention of their former friend. "Yes, how is Peter?"

"I don't know," James said keeping the bite out of his voice. "He and Snape, thankfully, don't actually socialize much."

But Sirius's face had cleared. His eyes were wide, latched onto James's own face, as if he couldn't look away for too long, as if he thought James would disappear. "I thought you were dead," his friend confessed. "I tried to come back for you, but you were gone. I thought they'd killed you. Then Andromeda escaped, and I started hoping..."

"How, I thought- the earring-"

"She tricked Bellatrix into cutting her ear off." Sirius's lips pulled back. "That's Andromeda for you."

James felt his head shake, as if someone else were shaking it. "Don't think that'll work for me."

Sirius opened his mouth and then closed it again before speaking. "Come on. Let's go inside."

"Where? The coffee house?"

Sirius smiled. "The headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix can be found right," he reached out and touched the wall between the coffee shop and a yarn store on the other side. "Here."

The wall parted like a curtain over a window, revealing a squashed little shop with a sign that read "Parchment Underground: Books, Used and New,” over the door Sirius had his hand on.

James whistled. “Fidelius charm?”

Sirius nodded proudly. “Andromeda’s work.”

“How is she?”

“She keeps busy.” Sirius shrugged. “She still wants dear Bella’s head on a pike though.”

“I don’t expect that’s ever going to change.”

Sirius didn’t answer. Instead, he grasped the brightly polished brass door handle, and pulled it open, waving James inside.

“It’s...” James glanced around at the shelves, sagging with leather bound books, and tables stacked high with rolls of parchment and piles of quills. “An actual bookstore.”

“Sort of.” He shot James a sharp, conspiratorial smile. “We don’t exactly sell anything.”

“I suppose not,” he replied dryly. “What with the Fidelius charm and all. So what is this place?”

“School room.”

James blinked. “What?”

“Snivvy landed us with a bit of a mess when he got us the ledger.” Sirius gestured eloquently at the room. “I mean resistance groups usually don’t have a bunch of kids they need to teach magic to. And we’ve got to track them down and convince their parents, and you know, I always thought there had to be some kind of enchantment on the Hogwarts acceptance letters, because most Muggles don’t just take your word for it when you tell them their child has magic.”

“Wouldn’t baby magic help with that though?” James pointed out. “I mean the thirtieth time their kid’s favorite toy goes flying off the shelf, don’t they usually get some idea?”

“We try to get to them before that.” Sirius grimaced. “Cant risk them doing something big and public when we don’t have a team of Ministry Obliviators and the trace to give us fair warning. Course, most of them, we just Confund into leaving for Australia or Canada. Safer for everyone. There’s only ever a couple a year we can’t get rid of.”

“You know, Hogwarts kids don’t have the trace either anymore.” James shot him a sidelong look. “Apparently it was a grotesque invasion of Pureblood privacy by an interfering, Muggle-loving ministry, that allowed them to spy on the entire family’s magical use under the pretext of monitoring a child.”

Sirius snickered.

There was a time, James remembered, when he hadn't guarded what he had said around Sirius at all, when the two of them spoke to each other as freely as they would have inside their own heads, and it was like they were one mind with two bodies. He longed for that easiness, conspicuous now in its absence. A part of him longed to shatter Sirius’s assumption that this was the Death Eaters’ own folly. Another part of him found himself a little disquieted by the vague amusement he felt at letting Sirius laugh unwittingly at Snape’s own little joke.

James remembered when Snape had made that case too. He had been beautifully indignant, something James didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

“So how do the parents who don’t leave usually take the whole secret resistance in the middle of a war part?” he asked wryly.

Sirius let out a bark of bitter laughter.

James smiled. “Sounds about right.”

“Not that I’m not happy to see you and all,” Sirius changed the subject. “But do actually have information for me, or are you both message and messenger today?”

“Er…” James said meaningfully. “It’s both really. And unfortunately, I’m the good news.”

Sirius clapped him on the shoulder. “You say that like you aren’t excellent news.”

James didn’t answer right away. It wasn’t until he bad waited so long that Sirius had begun to stare at him intently in that eerie-familiar way of his that James forced himself to say it. “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named suspects Snape and is watching him, which I why I’m here in the first place.”

“Figures he wouldn’t let you out unless he had to.”

James tried to summon up a wan smile, but Sirius’s expression told him he failed. “He has horcruxes. At least two, possibly many more.”

Sirius’s face looked strange and unfamiliar twisted into a grave expression. James held back the worst, that one of those horcruxes was his own child, and that he had allowed himself to forget for a few minutes that things were nearly hopeless, and that an evil thing had put a piece of himself inside his child, and that half the world would be willing to kill that child for it if they knew, including, James suspected, Harry himself.

“This complicates things,” Sirius said, breaking the silence James hadn’t even noticed falling.

“Yeah,” James agreed bleakly. “That it does.”

o0O0o

As James was leaving, a stray movement caught his eye. He lurched toward it, and grasped a handful of cloth, attached to an arm, attached to a boy who had no business away from school. “Harry! What in Merlin’s name-”

Harry cut him off. “Let me go.”

“Does your father know where you are?” Somehow, James suspected no matter how many times he used those words, your father, with Harry, they were never going to become less galling.

Harry just looked at him. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m taking you back to Hogwarts and hoping nobody noticed you’re gone.”

Harry shrugged. “It’s a Saturday. Nobody cares about where we go on weekends.”

“That’s a dangerous assumption to make,” James snapped. “Are you forgetting you and your father are under suspicion now? He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is watching you know. You’re not the son of a trusted Death Eater anymore.” He grabbed Harry’s wrist. “Come on, let’s get back to the school.”

“You’re going to tell Dad, aren’t you?”

“Noooo, I don’t want him to know about this any more than you do,” James told him. “You and I are going to go back to Hogwarts and forget this happened.”

“Isn’t that sort of irresponsible of you?” Harry asked suspiciously, before he could stop himself.

“Sure,” James said. “But we both know who’s going to get in more trouble if I tell. You’re okay this time, and if you don’t do it again, everything’s all right, and there’s no need for your father to know. But you pull this again, I will tell him, because then I know you’ll do it again and again until someone stops you. Do I make myself clear.”

Harry hunched his shoulders. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” James sighed. “Let’s get you back to Hogwarts.”

o0O0o

The door opened. Harry looked around the room, surprised at how normal it seemed, like the inside of exactly the kind of small Wizarding book store it was pretending to be. Of course he only had a moment to think that before he found a wand between his eyes. “I don’t know you, and I didn’t let you in, so your being here isn’t supposed to be possible.”

“I followed James!” Harry blurted out, eyes stretched so wide he thought they would fall out. In the corner was a short, fat little Christmas tree festooned with paper garlands and glowing glass balls. Harry stared at it, to avoid the face pressed into his own. “I overheard you telling him!”

The wand didn’t leave his throat. Instead it jabbed painfully into a line of muscle as Sirius Black pulled his face back. “You’re Snape’s kid.”

Harry nodded. “And you’re the leader of the Underground. I have something… I need a place to store something until I can figure out how to destroy them. Your brother told me to come here.”

“My brother?” The wand jabbed into his throat again.

“You’re Sirius Black, right?” At the man’s jerky nod, Harry went on, “He belongs to Avery. He told me you could help. The Dark Lord has Horcruxes. Reg said there were six.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Regulus Black only knew about six.

“Six!” Sirius Black yelped. “Six? Are you kidding me? We have to hunt down six-”

Harry supposed that answered the question of whether James had told him about the Horcruxes. “I have three, and I know where two more are.” He slid his bag off his shoulder and when Sirius Black dropped his wand, Harry opened it up and dumped the contents on the table. They didn’t look like much, just lying there, a ring, a locket, and a beat up crown. They looked like theater props, really, or maybe something a thief would try to pawn. Harry shoved that little piece of the Dark Lord down deep, using every trick his father had taught him to keep it locked up tight. “I had them in my trunk, but Reg says I shouldn’t keep them near me to long.”

“Where are the others?” Sirius Black demanded, circling him warily.

Harry shrugged. “Reg says the Lestranges have one in their bank vault, Goblet that used to belong to Helga Hufflepuff. The Malfoys have one at their house. And I’m pretty sure the Dark Lord’s pet snake’s one, but I don’t know for sure. That’s all six.”

Sirius Black kept staring at him as Harry shoved his hands into his pockets uncertainly “Why did you bring them here instead of to your father? What are you trying to pull, kid?”

“My dad doesn’t want me involved.” Harry shrugged.

“No wonder, what are you, twelve?”

Harry scowled. “Fifteen.”

“Of course you are.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m going to bet you don’t want me to let James know you showed up.”

Harry shrugged again. “Yeah. You going to tell him?”

“I don’t know, kid,” Sirius Black answered. “I get this massive unsolvable problem dropped in my lap, and you show up a month later with a solution all neatly tied up for me. And you tell me my brother’s alive and helping you. I don’t know. I need to think about it. But it’s not like you can do anything about it either way.”

o0O0o

“I can’t believe he’s alive and not a Death Eater.”

James shrugged. The gesture sent a prickle of familiarity up Sirius’s spine. It was probably nothing. The boy would have grown up with James around after all. He wondered if Snape noticed his son absorbing James’s mannerisms. “He’s He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s little showpiece for what happens to traitors. He’s… Sirius, he’s not really all there anymore. Been Crucioed a lot. How’d he get word to you anyway?”

Sirius smirked. “I have other contacts you know.”

“Glad to hear it.” James leaned on the table, elbow slotted between the piles of books. “I’d hate to think you were flying blind. So six.”

“I’ve got three, and I’ve got a plan to get another one. That’s what I need you for. I need polyjuice potion and some of sweet cousin Bella’s hair.”

James laughed softly. “This is going to be a disaster.”

o0O0o

“I went looking at the Malfoys’ Christmas party, Harry said. “And I found it.” Harry dropped the unassuming little Muggle diary in the pile.

“Just his snake left then,” Sirius said.

“And me.”

“What?”

Harry hunched his shoulders, pulling himself in until he was taking up as little space as possible. “I’m a horcrux too. That’s how we found out about them. He figured out my dad wasn’t loyal, so he made it so he couldn’t be killed unless I was dead.”

“Kid…”

“You don’t like my dad,” he said in a rush. “So I figured it wouldn’t be a problem for you like it is for Dad and James.”

Harry was a good kid. Smart, awkward, funny when he didn’t mean to be. When Sirius had walked into the headquarters, he had found him arguing the superiority of Quidditch over Football to an utterly unconvinced Dean Thomas. A good kid. And he had been raised surrounded by Death Eaters, murderers who didn’t care if somebody was a kid when they were playing politics. Sirius remembered the type. He felt a sudden wave of kinship for him. “Kid, that’s not the way it works.”

“You want to get rid of him, right?” Harry asked with something too miserable to be simple confusion. “And I need to be dead for that to happen!”

And there it was. Sirius stood up, feet crossing the short distance between the walls in the back office, and crossing it again before he noticed. The impossible problem James had dropped into his lap, and Harry had solved almost miraculously, was back and twice as impossible. “I’m not going to kill you,” he told Harry finally. “And you’re not going to kill yourself either. We’re going to figure out a way around this.”

“There isn’t a way around this,” Harry insisted desperately, despairingly. “That’s why he did it. You have to kill me.”

“There is no way I’m letting him railroad me into killing a kid.” Sirius snapped. Then he shook himself off like the dog he sometimes was and put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “He thinks we can’t find a way around this. He thinks we’ll give up and we won’t look. That’s why he did this. But that’s not going to be the way this goes.”

Harry’s lip curled into an incredulous frown.

“I have a letter to write to your father, and until he can take you home, I’m not leaving you alone.”

“I’m not going to kill myself,” Harry told him testily.

“Yeah well, forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Sirius shot back. His voice softened as he walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a large beaker of basilisk venom. “In the meantime, we could always destroy the rest of these horcruxes together.”

As they sat together, watching the strange assortment of objects dissolve and listening to their eerie unnatural shrieks, Sirius, the set of Harry’s shoulders loosened slightly, almost imperceptibly, but it was something. “You think he felt that?” Harry asked.

“No idea.” Sirius smiled. “But I hope so.”

o0O0o

Harry’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. If he weren’t so wrung out, his thoughts might have been racing but instead they crawled. But he didn’t have the energy to move either. He didn’t know how long it was, lying there in the dark until the bed bent under another person’s weight. “Dad?”

“You are not immortal.”

He opened his eyes. “What?”

His dad stared down at him, face wiped almost clean of any expression. “Someday you will die. The rest of the horcruxes would not have. But you will. We can’t kill the Dark Lord, but we can render his body uninhabitable. He will be a living ghost, as powerless as dust. And then, many years from now, when you die, he will die too. And for all that time, he will wish he were dead already.”


End file.
